U.S. Cuba programs: the stuff of spies?

The U.S. government Cuba democracy programs are being revamped to address concerns from Congress, which have held up the $20 million budget.By Frances Roblesfrobles@miamiherald.com

To the U.S. government aid workers who he suspected were secret agents, Cuban professor Raul Capote was "Pablo." He went by "Daniel" with his Cuban government contacts, who were spies for sure.

Now Havana claims that for the six years that he worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on educational workshops and library programs, Capote was a spook, too.

"The man started asking, what materials do you need?" Capote said in an installment of a Cuban documentary series, Cuba's Reason s. "The contacts that came — it was never the same person twice, always someone new — started to buy me what I needed for my work: money, camera, laptop, memory drives, all kinds of gear to pass information."

Capote is one of the Cuban intelligence agents recently exposed by Havana in its quest to pull the curtain back on one of the most controversial elements of Cuban-U.S. relations: USAID democracy programs. In a series of videos aired on state-run television and posted on the Internet, USAID contractors are shown meeting with alleged members of civil society, establishing libraries, arts workshops, distributing powdered milk and discussing secret electronic equipment.

The video series is the latest of a string of blows to the U.S. government's Cuba programs, which have struggled to maintain credibility while dogged by questions about its spending and mission. Sen. John Kerry has frozen this year's $20 million budget, forcing agency administrators to revamp the program and its management.

"These projects are not classified, but they are covert operations in Cuba," said Cuba analyst Philip Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute think tank in Virginia. "What these videos show is that they've got our number. They watch people come in and see who they meet with."

USAID spent nearly $95 million from 2007 to 2010, according to the Cuba Money Project website.

Much of USAID funds go to large companies such as Creative Associates, which was awarded $15.5 million in the past two years, according to the cubamoneyproject.org.

"The core of the USAID Cuba program remains in providing humanitarian support, building civil society and democratic space, facilitating the information flow in, out, and within the island," said Mark Lopes, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean for USAID. "These programs are comparable to what we and other donors do to support democracy and human rights in repressive societies all over the world."

The Cuban government contends that the program is a CIA front aimed at propping up civic leaders and getting them to foment revolution with high-tech gear, including controversial satellite modems known as BGANS.

"They don't present themselves as CIA, but as the time goes on, it starts to reveal itself," said Captain Mariana, a uniformed officer who appears in Capote's Fabricating Leaders video.

Lopes laughs.

"We are a development agency," he said, "not an intelligence agency."

The Fabricating Leaders episode showed surveillance footage of Capote with Marc Wachtenheim, the former program director for the Pan American Development Fund, an Organization of American States agency that got $2.3 million in USAID Cuba grants in 2008 alone.

Wachtenheim said he always operated his programs — humanitarian aid and essay contests on free-market economies — in the open. He does not believe his contacts in Cuba were state security agents, but rather "otherwise decent people who were 'turned' by the pressure of a totalitarian regime."

"This is an old tactic: go after the messenger, when you can't confront the message," Wachtenheim said. "The only surprising thing about these videos is how closely they resemble the East German propaganda of the 1960s. .… Isn't it curious that the same people who claim that foreign assistance programs in Cuba are ineffective, also go to all ends to try to discredit them?"

The PanAmerican Development Foundation issued a statement saying that it promotes civil society and private sector development that benefits disadvantaged people, and is prohibited from working with political parties or intelligence agencies. Creative Associates, which employs Caleb McCarry, the top Bush administration Cuba point-man, declined to comment.

One of the problems with U.S. Cuba programs is that it is difficult to track how Creative Associates and other large contractors dole out its funds, said Tracey Eaton, founder of Cuba Money Project, which monitors USAID Cuba funds.

"You can definitely say the government makes an effort to keep some of this stuff secret," said Eaton, a journalism teacher at Flagler College in Florida. "If posting something on the Internet will get a dissidentin trouble, naturally I would not post it. But if there is a balance between transparency in accounting and duty to taxpayers, the government leans toward protecting the person and keeping things secret."

There's reason.

Alan Gross, a development consultant awarded a $600,000 grant to foster communications on the island, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after getting caught sneaking satellite phones and BGANS to Cuba. In the past decade, the company that hired him, Development Alternatives Inc., received at least $2.7 billion in USAID funds for projects around the world, Eaton's site shows.

With Gross in jail and Sen. Kerry holding up funding, the Obama administration has ordered contractors to stop sending BGANS. The government also prohibits contractors from traveling to Cuba more than twice a year, and the trips are now vetted by top administrators.

"Senator Kerry has asked the administration to conduct a review of the programs before spending the next tranche of taxpayers' money to study their effectiveness, their implications for U.S. policy toward Cuba and Latin America, and their implications for Americans and Cubans participating in them," said Kerry spokesman Frederick Jones. "The review of something like this is an iterative process — a dialogue with the agencies involved — and the timing depends a lot on the administration's ability to respond to questions. Last year, the process took several months, and there was wide agreement that the improvements to the programs outweighed the slight inconvenience caused by the short delays."

Many of the ideas for internal management controls instituted in the last year came from Congress, Lopes said.

. "The fundamental principle of the program continues, but, is it under new management? Yes," Lopes said. "Are the programs managed differently? Yes."

Projects have shifted away from the university studies that have characterized the program.

"A lot of organizations, including us, had very good intentions. Unfortunately, it created a cottage industry here in Miami," said Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, which secured some $6 million between 2002 and 2010. "We would have meetings, and I'd sit there dumbfounded at some of the useless programs that were being funded."

Among them: condoms with the word "Cambio" (change) on them.

Teo Babun, who heads ECHO Cuba, a religious group that has a $6 million USAID grant, said his work is strictly humanitarian.

"We focus on children, churches and the elderly," Babun said. "We don't want to get in the face of the Cubans. It's not what the Cuban government says — that we're trying to topple the government or encourage a change in the regime. I never heard that as a strategy, never saw it written in a memo or heard it said in a meeting."

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